In the tiny inland town of Troy, there’s a boatbuilder who is also a teacher, and a writer, and a radio programmer, and a community activist. He is also a man who has helped keep the real in reality. BY DANA WILDE
44
Dana WIlde(2)
“C.GregRössel then see the World” is pretty clearly a product of his time. Not that he looks like it. He has the engineer’s hat, spectacles, and (graying) under-chin beard of a nineteenth-century Belfast shipwright. In his yard is parked a bright-green 1954 Willys Jeep pickup. A rotary-dial phone (with coil cord) hangs on his kitchen wall. To get his attention, you pull the clapper of the ship’s bell by the screen door. Usually it turns out that he’s not in the house at all, but in the workshop up the hill, where he’s been building and repairing wooden boats for 25 years. Rössel migrated to Maine along with thousands of others in the early 1970s, hoping to escape the industrialized, homogenized life of mainstream America and carve out a simpler, more community-oriented existence. By all accounts, he succeeded. Rössel has built up a well-known, reliable boatbuilding business over the last two decades (the sign by his driveway in
GREG RÖSSEL
MAINE BOATS, HOMES & HARBORS
|
June / July 2008
|
Issue 100